This has been cross-posted on BlogHer.com.

A few days ago, I received a comment from someone alerting me that a post of mine had been pirated. I clicked through to the offending post, and found myself on a product page for a rice and lentil pilaf in a box. To be sure, they had taken nearly verbatim some of the language from my mujadara post. I said,

Mujadara is one of those deceptive dishes that fools you into thinking
it's an easy, one-dish meal. I mean, it's just rice, lentils and
onions. How hard could it be? Well, it's not hard, but nor is it
simple. You must cook each thing independently and mix them carefully
in order to achieve the contrasting textures and flavors that make this
a successful dish.

As part of their product description, they said,

Mujadara is one of those Mediterranean dishes that fools one into
thinking it’s an easy to make, one-dish meal. In reality, it’s not
hard, but nor is it simple. One must cook each item independently and
mix them carefully in order to achieve the contrasting textures and
flavors that make this a successful dish.

Closing with, "This dish is ready to eat in two minutes by simply microwaving the contents or boiling the entire pouch in boiling water"

At first I was baffled, then amused, for the words they had stolen describe the careful preparation of separate ingredients to achieve a greater whole, yet they were selling a product that requires only the addition of hot water. I laughed it off.

There is a photograph of me on a prominent Bay Area food blogger's site today. Can you spot me? First commenter who posts the correct URL of the post gets a free copy of Stairway Walks in San Francisco by…

Don't panic; I'm not abandoning Hedonia. Though lately it may have seemed a foregone conclusion. I admit I've been a neglectful parent of late. Real-world concerns, like work, have really gotten in the way of my hedonistic pursuits over the…

Hedonia is today's TypePad Featured Blog! I got wind of this a couple days ago, and was all atitter. Until I saw the actual post. Now I'm all a-blush. I won't republish the entire post here, but my cheeks went…

Hedonia is one today!

One year ago today I signed up with TypePad, picked a generic template and quickly jotted out some thoughts on a dinner the night before with some friends at The Public. My decision at the time was fairly spontaneous, and I scarcely even knew what my motivations were.

One year ago I knew practically nothing of the blogosphere. I had only recently discovered bigtime blogs like Gawker and was both intrigued and bemused by the simmering cauldron of content bubbling beneath the surface in the seemingly bottomless well of personal blogs. Where mainstream media was like an oratory broadcast over a loudspeaker, the blogs were like the nattering of the world’s largest cocktail party.

An apt metaphor, that. For, like an actual cocktail party, sometimes the din of the collective voices makes it impossible to hear any one. Other times one voice rises above the others to proffer an idea, a suggestion or a witty bon mot. And when your name is mentioned, you hear it no matter how far across the room you are, and you sense a whole bunch of heads turning your direction.

Revisiting my early posts, I hear my faltering voice struggling to be heard. I didn’t know what to write about, how often I should write, whether to use real names, fake names, initials, to write long posts or short posts … it was a brave new world I had to invent for myself. There were no right or wrong answers.